Experts Uncertain How Seizing Will Affect Boy

Goggled, helmeted, weapons-toting men who grab a little boy before dawn and whisk him through a gantlet of flashing camera lights and eventually into a roaring helicopter would seem to prove there is a boogeyman after all.

But if the government’s abrupt action Saturday to seize 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez played out before the encamped news media as a child’s nightmare come true, expert speculation on how the incident might affect him was much less unified.

Some suggested that the predawn raid on the home may have been a real blow to a youngster who has already endured a lifetime of woe, from the divorce of his parents in Cuba before he was born to his flight from home with his mother to her drowning five months ago.

Indeed, it appears the youngster has not grasped that tragedy yet, given his recent remark that his mother was merely lost somewhere around Miami--a child’s literal rendering of “loss.”

Constance Ahrons, director of USC’s marriage and family program, said the boy’s life so far has been a series of losses that will be hard to recover from and may impair his ability to trust people. And the action by federal agents was violent and threatening in a way that could stir fears aroused by his mother’s death.

“Remember, his mother was wrenched away too,” she said.

But some psychology experts saw the armed federal agents as rescuers, plucking the boy from a situation that had become a kind of chronic trauma, with his Miami relatives, according to critics, using him for political leverage. To those experts, later photos showing a smiling Elian in his father’s arms were deeply reassuring.

“He’s been an emotional hostage to the political process,” said Dr. Jon Shaw, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

“You can look at the day’s events as traumatic, but you have to put it in the context of the situation he’s been in over the last few months, which I would also call traumatic,” he said.

Shaw emphasized the primary need for the boy to be reunited with his father to restore some continuity to his family’s past in his mother’s absence. “Now the little boy has a chance to be a little boy again,” he said.

Complicating attempts to plumb the incident for psychological meanings are layers of history and symbolism attached to the simmering controversy.

Critics say it was especially harmful for the boy to have been wrested from the fisherman who rescued him from the sea.

To some experts, the larger political considerations apparently trump the more narrow concerns about the boy’s recent experiences. Dr. Juan Rodriguez, a Cuban refugee and child psychiatrist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, said it would benefit the boy to be reunited with his father--but not if that means his returning to Cuba, because of the Castro government’s oppression.

“Nobody deserves to be sent back to Cuba,” said Rodriguez, adding that he had no clinical opinion of the case because he has not examined the boy. “My political opinion is that a dog should not be sent back to Cuba. I think this child has been treated with less rights than a pet would be in the U.S.”

(None of the experts interviewed has examined Elian but base their speculations on public information.)

Robert Butterworth, chairman of psychology at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk and a psychological trauma specialist, has been a strong advocate for reuniting Elian and his father. But he sharply criticized the government’s storming into the house and getting the boy, suggesting that it would add profoundly to fears he already has. Also, he said, Elian had developed important bonds with not only his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, but with Donato Dalrymple, one of the fisherman who rescued the boy from the sea.

Several experts suggested that the boy, because of his experiences, is likely to be afraid to form emotional attachments, a result of being repeatedly torn from loved ones.

William Pollack, a Harvard-affiliated psychologist and author of the 1998 book “Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood,” said the snatching of the boy would probably add to his trauma. But he said it was a good thing that he was now in a less-charged environment where mental health professionals can “try to gain his trust and have a chance to talk about what he really wants.”

Some experts warned against over-interpreting the seemingly happy reunion images of Elian.

“He’s likely to repress the trauma and try to seem happy,” he said. But what gets repressed for the moment eats away inside and may emerge later in unhealthy ways, Pollack said.

Thus Pollack said he hopes the boy sees psychologists especially trained in treating boys.

Similarly, Ahrons of USC said the pleasant photos of the family reunion did not convince her that Elian is out of the woods.

“That’s just his initial reaction,” she said. “It doesn’t address the long-term issues around this crisis.”

Max Castro, a sociologist at University of Miami affiliated think tank on Latin American affairs, said he was glad to see the boy with his father again and hopes for the peaceful return to Cuba. The violence of Saturday, he said, was rather like pulling off a bandage: It hurts, but that is better than a festering wound.

“I’m sad it came to this,” Castro, who is no relation to Fidel Castro, said of the armed action. “It is an ugly image. But then we have a beautiful image of the father and son reunited.”